"Loses access"? It sounds more like they let it expire on purpose. And to me it sounds like a strong message to Twitter and everybody, that G is really serious about G+. "We don't need Twitter, we have our own stream pretty soon."
I read it the other way; that Twitter were upset about G+ and wouldn't re-sign.
I noted a [deleted] post at the bottom of this thread, where the replies indicate that "Twitter couldn't have known about G+", hence I guess the [deleted] post had similar sentiments to me. Google having social aspirations has been well-known for a long time. I could very much imagine Twitter writing a contract which says that the stream was only available to Google for as long as Google wasn't directly competing with Twitter. Google couldn't sign such a contract. Google+ is direct Twitter competition.
the original story on SEL outlined some of the smaller details and intricacies of what is happening here. Namely that Google and Bing signed their firehose deals with Twitter at the same time for the same contract length, but only Google has been shutoff now - which suggests that Twitter and Google couldn't come to an agreement for some reason (but I doubt it was financial)
I thought that was an important point in the original story[1], but Mashable didn't copy and paste that far down
Google sees this feature as advantageous to Twitter, just as much as Twitter sees it as advantageous to Google. Negotiates to extend the contract could have failed for any number of reasons.
Without access to the firehose, Google cannot derive any value from tweets, but without Google's help, there's a good change that Twitter can improve their own real-time search. So I would say that Twitter is in the stronger negotiating position here, especially since with Buzz and Google+, Google is trying to create its own firehose of user-created realtime content.
Did anyone actually notice and give a damn? I personally remember those animated twitter stream search results as being a useless distraction, and I am quite glad they are gone. I think google realized they were of little relevance to the typical searcher and Google now has enough data to decide the results aren't worth paying much for. In fact, Google has already long since pulled the realtime search results from the primary serps.
I personally find Twitter to mostly be noise, so I really got no value out of that real time stream result. If I really wanted to search Twitter results, I'd have gone to the Twitter search page, not Google.
Live search was awesome to find out about breaking news before even the news wires got it. When there was a bomb scare in Times Square, I remember reading the tweets and getting some great information.
I don't give a damn. Yes, there are some useful tweets but 99% of them are trivial noise. Google probably didn't invested a lot of time in filtering the noise. So getting rid of it was the best decision.
This headline is misleading. The contract Google had with Twitter expired on July 2, 2011. There hasn't been a statement by either company indicating why the contract wasn't extending.
What is the real value behind the real time search stuff? I never actulally saw anything important, just 100s of people saying the same thing with #bangs. I'm not being ignorant. Englighten me. This is just a question.
I was thinking the same until very recently when I needed to know the tally of that greek austerity vote up to the second. I used Google realtime and it worked wonderfully. It's very annoying that it's gone now.
I've found it very useful for "breaking news" types of things where the news sites haven't quite gotten up to speed with what is happening, or when it's a niche enough event that it wouldn't get news coverage.
Personally, I found it very useful for following stories as they were developing, or to see if other people were having issues with a service when I was. Having this integrated into my normal Google searches was convenient, but I guess using Twitter's search directly isn't terrible.
I am pretty sad that this contract is not renewed. I found Google realtime search ironically provided a much better search interface for tweets than the one twitter did.
Plus they already crawl Twitter. It may not be real time over all of Twitter but I bet the accounts with a great deal of followers get crawled every few hours.
In a way you are right, but I think this approach also provides them with leverage to hedge their bets.
The main differentiating factor in this case is their competitors are focused primarily on solving one problem, whereas Google is attempting to solve a multitude of problems in an attempt to win through convergence. That is to say, their solutions may not be as polished, but they are all in one place, presented to you in an accessible and convenient matter.
You may be proven right, it would certainly seem G+ has huge potential: everyone I know so far, and most of the reviews on the net are very positive. It will integrate into all the others google's products, and with that, google will be the king of social.
But that's not the point I tried to make. Based on the post, my opinion was that Google did not want to renew the deal with twitter (and vice versa) which is strange. They are at war already with everybody else (ms, apple, oracle, facebook) and don't need another enemy.
Microsoft uses this approach with MS Office and once things started going their way it was next to impossible for a competitor to attack any one product.
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of other tiny startups against Google. I for one want plus, Android and Google search to come up on top.
Why do you feel that your world will be a better place with one company controlling and eavesdropping on every aspect of your communication and search for information?
(Yes, my question indicates a very slight amount of bias!)
Because I trust that one company more any any of the other ones. Google's corporate interests are more closely aligned with my personal interests wrt to an open Internet. Sure they have the potential to know a lot about me, but that already happens with a lot of other companies.
I used to do consulting for a company (LocatePLUS) that bought databases from different sources and then linked them. They sold this as a service to law enforcement and private investigators on a per query basis.
I've said it before and got a lot of downvotes, but one company controlling everything doesn't really pose a problem to the open web or to users privacy, but instead to other companies, to smaller startups, small entrepreneurs, free market in general, innovation, regulation...
Also, unrelated to your reply but... while I understand how people might personally like Google (or Apple, or MS, or whatever), but business is just business, shouldn't be a religion or a sport. People should see beyond the "I like that company".
In the wrong hands one company controlling too much can certainly cause problems with a lack of innovation. Given all of the things Google has been involved with I don't see that happening any time soon though. That is one other reason I like and trust Google most of all the big companies that show up here; they keep pushing the envelope. Only time will tell the impact that might have on smaller companies
I definitely see Google as a business and know that circumstances can change with a change in management or operating environment; there is no way around that though. In my opinion we can either fight big companies and hope to have the government or other large companies keep them in check or we can try to help shape the environment and support companies that further our best interests.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is more about Twitter's other customers rather than Twitter's attitude to Google+. There are many who would pay a lot to get one over Google.
I actually noticed that the realtime search had more or less stopped showing up in my results anyway...which was nice because I always just ignored them anyways.
Did anybody find them useful? Or is maybe that's the reason Google is letting that go?
It's too bad because it's clear an enormous development effort had gone into making it possible.
I guess I meant that they could have released Google+ to coincide with the end of the contract, having realised that removing Twitter from realtime and replacing it with G+ would give G+ a traffic boost.
